Donald Westlake - Smoke

But that took a lot longer than he'd expected. It was over an hour before he saw the damn thing, so smug and demure and unnoticeable and safe, tucked away in the parking lot next to the local firehouse. "Goddam, Freddie," Barney said out loud, driving by, grinning at that van behind the chain-link fence. "You're a pretty clever fella, Freddie. But so am I."

Barney parked half a block away, and from the glove box he took the tailing transmitter he'd lifted years ago from Stores at Organized Crime Detail, for just such a situation as this. The tailing transmitter came in two parts, one being a tiny dome-shaped black bug with one sticky side when you peeled off the tape, and the other being a small flat metal box, about the size and shape of a TV remote control, but with a round compass dial where the remote would have had all its buttons. Leaving the compass in the glove box, Barney pocketed the bug and took a walk.

At the firehouse, Barney ID'd himself as a member of a collateral uniformed force. He explained that a blue Toyota had been involved earlier today in a fender-bender with a car driven by a well-known mafioso, and that the Organized Crime Squad was trying to find that Toyota to tell its driver he might be facing more retribution than he expected. No, Barney didn't have the Toyota's tag number, but there was a blue Toyota of the right model parked next to that van in that parking lot there that matched the description. Okay if he looked it over?

The owner of the Toyota, a young red-haired Irish fireman with last night's hangover lying on him like the results of a poison gas attack, assured Barney his vehicle had been in no fender-benders at all, but go ahead and look. So Barney went ahead and looked, studying the Toyota's exterior from every angle, and along the way sticking the transmitter bug onto the frame of Peg Briscoe's van. Then he thanked the fire guys for their help, and left the firehouse.

All afternoon and evening, Barney sat in his car, parked where he could see Peg Briscoe's building, and all afternoon and evening nothing happened. Which gave him time to think, and what he thought was that he was involved in something a little different here. If you're on the lookout for an invisible man, it isn't business as usual. For instance, forget descriptions. Forget tailing the guy through the streets. All you can hope to do is find out for sure where he is, close down that spot, and when you know you've got him inside a perimeter he can't get out of, you make your proposition.

Barney knew exactly what his proposition would be when the time came, and he thought he knew how to make Noon go along with it. His proposition was a straightforward one: assassination. Forget industrial espionage, tiptoeing around cigarette-company meetings, all this penny-ante stuff. There were those two guys, for instance, that he was endlessly paying off to keep their evidence about Barney to themselves. They were still alive only because Barney Beuler would be the prime suspect if either of them went down. The prosecutors were right now trying to get something on those guys, to force them to give up Barney, and he knew it. Take them out, and nobody would ever be able to put together an indictment against Barney Beuler; nobody, ever.

But how to do it? How to terminate those dear old friends? Barney had brooded on this problem for months. He couldn't do it personally; they'd have him in a second. And who could he hire that wouldn't turn on him, set him up, sell him for their own rotten reasons?

But if you had yourself an invisible man, and if that invisible man had a big family he liked, and a girlfriend he wanted to protect, you could be in Europe if you wanted, safe and clean and absolutely untouchable, while those two dangerous guys went down. And then after that, Noon could still be useful. Through his job, naturally, Barney knew a few guys in the world of organized crime, and those people were always looking for the clean hit. Farm Freddie Noon out. Why not? Retire on the little son of a bitch.

The only snag that Barney could see, other than finding Noon in the first place, was that violence had never been part of the guy's MO. But that was okay; everybody's capable of violence. Noon had just never been motivated before, that's all.

In the meantime, there was still the first step to accomplish. Find Noon, box him in. So Barney sat in his car as the long June twilight descended on Bay Ridge, and he watched Peg Briscoe's apartment, and nothing at all happened. It would be nice, wouldn't it, if she came out? It would be even nicer if the door opened and nobody came out. Barney was looking forward to that one, hope against hope.

But no, it didn't happen. Around eight, he drove away to find a fast-food joint, then swung around the firehouse on the way back and the van was still there, so he took up his position again, parked where he could see Peg Briscoe's front door.

A little after nine, he called home, told his wife he was on stakeout and she could call him on the car phone if she needed anything. Around ten, he called his girlfriend on West Seventy-fourth Street in Manhattan and told her he'd probably come over around midnight, why not have a nice little supper ready? And at eleven-thirty, he quit for the night.

One of the things Barney had that he hoped nobody knew about was a second car. He kept it in an apartment building's garage on the block behind his girlfriend's place, and he had bribed the supers involved so he now had the keys he needed to take the elevator from his girlfriend's place down to the basement, go through several locked doors and one narrow open areaway, and eventually wind up in the garage. If the shooflys were watching his girlfriend's place they'd just have to assume he was spending entire days in the sack, while they were sitting in cars surrounded by empty cardboard cups. Good, ya fucks.

Barney and his second car, a nondescript older Chevy Impala, reached Bay Ridge a little before eight-thirty in the morning, and the van was still there. He drove over to park near Briscoe's building, and was barely in position when out she came, by herself — well, maybe by herself — and walked away toward the firehouse.

At last. Barney placed the transmitter compass on the dashboard and waited; the thing would make a low buzzing sound once the van was in motion, and he'd be able to follow it without ever having to be within sight of it.

It's funny, he thought, waiting for the buzz, how quickly you get used to an impossibility. A week ago, he would have said there was no such thing as an invisible man, that was old movie shit. But all he had to hear was that some serious people said there was an invisible man, and that they were willing to spend serious bread to find him, and doubt vanished like . . . well, like an invisible man. What it comes down to is, you don't question the real world, right? Because if you do, they put you away where the walls are soft, right? Right.

Buzz. Barney started his engine. But then, instead of the buzz getting fainter, as it would if the van moved away from him, it got louder, so Barney switched off his engine, and here came the van, Briscoe at the wheel. She stopped in front of her building, opened the van's side door, and then proceeded to go between van and building several times, lugging heavy suitcases and liquor-store cartons.

O-kay! Pay dirt! Barney sat and watched, grinning from ear to ear, and pretty soon Briscoe slid the side door shut, got behind the wheel, and took off. Barney waited till she was out of sight, then followed.

And now Rhinebeck, ninety miles north of the city beside the Hudson River, long ago a port town, when river traffic meant something. Peg Briscoe had driven straight here, like a homing pigeon, north out of the city, up the Taconic Parkway, then west to the river. The whole way, Barney hung back out of sight, listening to the transmitter buzz and watching the compass, and it wasn't until they were in Rhinebeck itself that he saw the van again, five vehicles ahead at the town's only traffic light. He considered dawdling here to get himself caught by the next red, but the hell with it. In town there was enough traffic to hide among, even if she was looking for a tail, and it was clear she wasn't.